The delivery of content to clients of a mobile communication network is of significant interest. Delivery of media, such as audio, pictures or video has widespread applicability. Technical implementations may be based on streaming technologies. The streaming may be live streaming or on demand. The delivery of content may also be made by download. For illustration, media delivery to vehicles is regarded as being interesting. A significant fraction of radio consumption happens in the car, and always being able to reach the favorite stations may be of interest to both users and service providers. At the same time, audio streaming has low driver distraction risk. Further examples for delivery of content include various car infotainment features, such as delivery of video to a backseat entertainment system, online gaming via a backseat entertainment system, but also traffic and navigation information. Movies may be delivered to a car over the mobile communication network for viewing at a backseat entertainment system. Additional examples for the delivery of content to clients of a mobile communication network include the delivery of video or other media to handheld devices, or online gaming for handheld devices. The access network of the mobile communication network may prone to experiencing an overload situation when a large number of people located in the same area, such as a school yard, wishes to view the same movie at the same time.
Different technical implementations of media streaming to vehicles or other clients are conceivable. For streaming over a wireless communication network, the streaming solution should provide adaptability to accommodate fluctuating link rates of the current wireless link.
Adaptive streaming may utilize the Real-Time Transport Protocol (RTP) as transport protocol, and the Real-Time Streaming Protocol (RTSP) as session initiation and control protocol. Another approach to implement adaptive streaming is based on adaptive Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) streaming. In the latter case, media may be stored at a streaming server as a sequence of media files encoded with different rates. The client may be informed before the session or updated during the session about the different media files and the associated bit rates via the transfer of a corresponding manifest file. In response thereto, the client may execute rate adaptation by requesting a media file with the suited bit rate from the server. An adaptive streaming solution is described in 3GPP TS 26.233 V9.0.0 (2009-12), for example.
In such adaptive streaming solutions, rate adaptation is carried out on an individual session level. This limits flexibility in adapting content delivery. For illustration, as the number of clients which request content delivery increases, congestion situations in the radio access network may become more likely. The service provider which offers the content only has limited options to react to such situations when quality degradation is executed at an individual session and user level. Also, conventional adaptive streaming also makes it challenging to take into account constraints which may be due to, for example, agreements on data volumes which may be delivered by a given service provider over a given communication network.